What happened to home?
Tu Fu, the man on the hill, and the lure of belonging.
I had strayed from the rutted path, which had been partially washed away by the recent rains, when I spotted a clearing on the slope above. Although I’d often trekked that way, cutting over the mountain by the side of a stream, I hadn’t noticed signs of human habitation before. Now I could see neat rows of vegetables growing in a small, fenced area of terracing beside some banana trees. As I stood and marveled at this unexpected cultivation, an elderly man appeared out of nowhere, shirtless in shorts and sandals, his body sinewy and weather-beaten.
How long had he been living on that Hong Kong hillside? “For some time,” he answered nonchalantly, as if time was relative. It had started out as a temporary arrangement, he told me. There were family issues and money troubles. But soon he got used to off-grid living. The idea of going back to a cramped apartment was too much to bear.
He showed me inside his shelter, an abandoned World War II bunker. “These people knew how to build,” he said, tapping a sturdy concrete lintel. There was bedding in one corner and a “kitchenette” in the other, with a stove and kettle powered by a solar generator he’d rigged up. “Home” he said, as we stepped back into the garden.
As a historian, I’ve spent a good part of my career studying pandemics, and what I’ve learned is that it’s often during or in the aftermath of crises that “homelessness” becomes newly visible. At the same time, society’s emotional investment in “home” intensifies in proportion to the level of threat it perceives.
In Hong Kong, a British colony until the territory’s “handover” to China in 1997, outbreaks of cholera, plague, and tuberculosis, led colonial authorities to bring in new housing regulations while they clamped down on the Chinese “homeless” who lived in boats or whose dwellings were deemed to be less than homely. The homeless, conceived as an undifferentiated but teeming mass, were viewed as disease carriers and a source of social instability. Government reports emphasized the spatial indeterminacy of dilapidated Chinese living spaces where moral and material boundaries collapsed, leading to noxious spillages between bedroom, kitchen, and privy. The fluidity of space and the repetition of hydraulic metaphors of flow and liquescence in government sanitary reports, linked the Chinese “den” to the water world as a source of lethal contagion.
From March 2020, after the Covid outbreak was declared a global pandemic, worries about home and homelessness were amplified in the context of lockdowns and quarantine restrictions, along with work-from-home and virtual schooling. For many, home became a refuge from the virus. For the poor in temporary housing or for those out of work, who couldn’t afford to pay the rent or keep up the mortgage, home became a vulnerability.
During the Hong Kong shutdown, hiking was my chief antidote to the frustrations of life in quarantine. On long weekend rambles across Hong Kong Island, Lantau, and the New Territories, I’d reflect on the books I’d been reading. As I set out on my hike, the day I ran into the old man on the hill, I’d recently finished David Hawke’s Little Primer of Tu Fu and was on to David Hinton’s Awakened Cosmos, a philosophical meditation on the poet’s life and works.
I’d been introduced to Tu Fu’s writing in 2009, when I began taking Chinese lessons from a Hong Kong friend. Since then, Tu Fu’s poetry, like that of his older contemporary Li Bai, has been a source of inspiration. Or perhaps consolation is the word.
Born in 712 CE, in Gongyi, a city on the Yellow River in Henan Province, Tu Fu’s life was marked by loss. His mother died when he was an infant and later, after he failed to pass the imperial examination—the path to a certain future—he spent years impoverished and itinerant. This was also a period of political turmoil in China as the authority of the Tang dynasty was challenged and a civil war, known as the An Lushan Rebellion, tore the country apart. The poet and his family experienced separation and hunger (one of Tu Fu’s sons died of starvation) as they fled the enveloping violence in search of a safe haven.
Not surprisingly, home and homelessness are key themes in Tu Fu’s poetry. While his poems are poignant evocations of an ever-elusive home, they’re also insightful in the way they counter the impulse to settle with recognition that being fully attuned to the world entails being fundamentally unsettled. An image Tu Fu uses is that of an empty boat adrift in a current. In life there is no fixed point of return, no stasis, only flow. Our need to find roots and belong can easily become an impediment to living and, worse, a means of division.
The Chinese character for “home”—家 pronounced jiā—is an ideogram that depicts a pig under a roof, suggesting the economic basis that sustains the home, along with ritual activities, such as communal eating, that give the home its social meaning. In ancient China, home was rooted in the land and its cultivation. This is the Confucian moral order that undergirds the state’s governance; home stretches from shelter to family, and from community to nation.
While I was learning about Tu Fu, the aftershocks of the 2007/8 financial crash were being felt. The origins of the crisis, which would lead to deep recession, lay in the bursting of the US housing bubble, underpinned by high-risk subprime mortgages, resulting in defaults and mass foreclosures. China was also undergoing a profound transformation. When Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader of the People’s Republic, had begun lifting economic restrictions from the late 1970s, foreign investment started to pour into the country, eventually fueling a speculative frenzy, above all in the largely unregulated property sector.
Between 2011 and 2013, it’s been estimated that China used more cement than the United States did throughout the twentieth century. Individuals invested their life savings in real estate, often before construction began, with developers insisting on upfront payments.
But as the Chinese government began to tighten borrowing, thousands of residential construction projects were aborted across the country. Many over-leveraged developers teetered on the brink of default, or collapsed, among them the mammoth Evergrande Group, once the most valuable real estate corporation in the world. In January 2024, a Hong Kong court ordered its liquidation.
In China, half-completed buildings known as lanwei lou, meaning “rotten tail buildings,” are the rusting monuments of this boom-bust economy. While many lie vacant, some are occupied by homeowners who live without basic utilities. As one Chinese official has conceded, there are probably more empty homes than people in China to fill them.
As in many parts of the world, home is no longer emblematic of security, in the sense of a dwelling place or shelter, but exists as a speculative commodity and wagered collateral in a market system driving national “development.” Meanwhile, millions of Chinese rural workers have moved to the cities with temporary residential permits, estranged both from their inhospitable new surroundings and their home villages. As the literary scholar Chengcheng You has observed, “home” in China has become “an infinitely deferred conceptual space.”
In Hong Kong, which has one of the world’s widest wealth gaps (with one in five people living below the poverty line), limited land, densely populated neighborhoods, and a shortage of supply have made home ownership unaffordable for many. Home for some is an “illegal structure” on a rooftop, or a subdivided unit known as a “cage dwelling.” Or a World War II bunker.
But why has my encounter with Tu Fu and my unexpected meeting with that old man on the hill—the one literature, the other life—now merged in my mind as a singular event? The answer, I think, lies in the fact that both raise similar questions about the meaning of home and homelessness, which have come to the fore in a post-pandemic world riven by geopolitical conflict, occupation, and mass migration. How do we accommodate an unsettling reality, characterized by insecurity, violence, and loss, with the profound human impulse to be rooted, to belong? Homelessness, Tu Fu suggests, is always the shadow history of home, the one a mirror image of the other. Although separated from us by over a millennium, what comes through in his writing is the courage to live with uncertainty and resist the siren song of an immutable home, even though, as an exile in an age of war, home was what he longed for most.